Search

Digital media adoption is revelatory not only regarding larger transformations of public communication. Differences, tensions and negotiations about gains and losses in this process also mark cultural points of departure and features deemed most significant about them. A US-German comparative study of digital media adoption in professional journalism reveals two tendencies that occur simultaneously but to different degree: 1) diversification of professionalism, which is accompanied by a media environment that is increasingly hybrid and 2) corroboration of professionalism, connected to tendencies of normalizing new technologies. Aside from similar experiences of accelerated news cycles, digital- and particularly social media adoption reflects distinct professional cultures and their responses to the crisis of traditional news media. German journalists in this study reproduced more than altered professional norms through social media while their advent shook the entire conception of what US journalists did, led them to adjust their occupational roles and expand their professional boundaries. Especially Twitter featured US reporters as allowing more transparency of practice. Findings are interpreted according to media systemic differences and distinct, culturally shaped positions journalism inhabits in these civil societies. This paper is based on ethnographic research of two groups of political reporters in the US and Germany. Field research stretched from spring of 2009 to summer of 2012, set at state governments in Albany, New York and Munich, Bavaria, involving participant observation, 72 interviews with journalists (from 31 different news organization) and spokespeople (across all political parties and branches of government). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a novel theoretical framework to study journalistic practice, which is inspired by American cultural sociology and field theory. The main argument is that, although newspeople draw pragmatically on collective representations of journalistic professionalism to assert their autonomy, they are truly committed to these cultural beliefs at the same time. An analysis of ethnographic data on journalist-source relations at the New York State government will demonstrate this. Autonomy demands prompt journalists to draw boundaries against their sources while sustaining access to information requires them to maintain sociable relations that blur such boundaries. They negotiate these twin demands through "boundary performance" and "boundary management." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies an organizational perspective on political communication, which is grounded in frameworks of organization theory and economic sociology and is thereby more specifically concerned with embeddedness between the political sphere and news media. This novel view in the sociological field of media studies assumes that social relations between those two spheres on the level of journalists and press officers has consequences on how efficient and effective they can realize their respective interests. How these relations are balanced in terms of boundary making and cooperation can be taken as an indicator for the constitution and the balance of power of a specific political/media culture. Studying local newsbeats ethnographically and examining its resulting coverage content analytically in a U.S.-European comparative study could thus shed light on the implications of embeddedness for political news in these cultural environments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stimulated by debates on public sociology in the recent years I studied contributions of sociologists in daily newspapers in Austria. Although sociologists are rather present in the Austrian press, I argue this remains without noticeable effects on public opinion formation; the topics sociologists write and talk about are rather arbitrary and they lack factual content. Although my data refers to sociologists in the Austrian press, the study's conclusions might be true to the wider sociological community: Through such exposure, a public profile of sociology cannot evolve. Furthermore, the article discusses criteria that prevent and complicate the relationship between sociologists and the press: avoidance of publicity, the problem of values and ideology, incompatibilities of language-games, divergence of relevance criteria, and deficient cultural empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]